Stuff just keeps on piling up today - and I'm trying to work through my second playthrough of Mass Effect 2 on insanity (fourth playthrough overall). I have the sneaking suspicion, though, that nobody sympathises with my problems... Anywho, Google just unveiled the tablet user interface for Android 3.0, Honeycomb. Looks pretty decent I guess - somehow, it reminds me of Tron.

Put it this way: as an iPad owner, when I see a supposed iPad killer I’m the technological equivalent of the fox in the Old Speckled Hen adverts: “Yes, it’s different. But it’s not an iPad.” I’m not saying that when I watch the Honeycomb video.

"Pretty, impressive

Pretty matters when you’re looking at something for hours on end: I switched to the Mac because I like the way it renders text. By making an OS that isn’t an iOS clone, by making something that’s the beautiful swan to Froyo’s ugly duckling, Honeycomb looks like something non-geeks would switch to because they really, really, really like the way it looks.

That’s an achievement for any tech firm; for a firm as engineering-driven as Google it’s a miracle.

It’s also terrible news for Microsoft. iOS on the iPad works because it’s a tablet OS. Honeycomb works because it’s a tablet OS (Froyo, for all its joys, isn’t: it’s a phone OS scaled up). Windows 7 tablets won’t work, because Windows 7 isn’t a tablet OS. Putting it in tablets is like sticking a beak on a dog, hurling it into the air and telling everyone it’s an eagle.

To keep the tenuous animal metaphors going a bit longer, in 2010 tablet computing was a one horse race: Apple had the horse, and everyone else was racing donkeys. In Honeycomb, it looks like we have another horse."